James Kicinski-McCoy is a writer, specializing in creative marketing and branding, is a co-founder and editor of Mother Magazine, and co-owner of Two Son. She lives with her husband and four children in Nashville, Tennessee.

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KNIT 101 / GETTING STARTED

01/17/2014

So now that you have your stitches cast on to one needle, you’re ready to start knitting! There are two basic foundation stitches in knitting: the knit stitch and the purl stitch. Once these two stitches are learned, they can be combined in a seemingly endless number of ways to create different textures and patterns. For this simple scarf, we will just be doing the knit stitch. You’ll want to make sure the bottom edges of the cast-on loops all line up at the bottom of the needle. Hold this needle in your left hand (the short tail of yarn should be closest to your hand), and hold the empty needle in your right hand.

Insert the tip of the empty needle into the first stitch on the left needle as shown. The right needle should be crossed behind the left needle. With your right hand, wrap the yarn around the right needle one time, counter-clockwise.

Bring the tip of the right hand needle with its wrap of yarn through the loop on the left hand needle and to the front. Then just slide the whole stitch off the left needle.

Congratulations, you have just knit your first stitch! You will have one knit stitch on your right needle (you can tighten it up a bit by pulling on the yarn attached to the ball). Now just repeat this with all the other cast on stitches, until you have transferred all the stitches to your right needle.

It should look like this. The needle with all the stitches on it becomes your new left hand needle, and you just repeat all the stitches over again! Each time you knit a row of stitches you will be adding a row to your scarf. It’s really important to make sure the “work” (the rows of stitches that have already been knitted) stays lined up, and at the bottom. Here is a short video where you can see the knit stitch in action…it really helps to see it live! Next week we will learn how to finish the scarf…happy knitting!

Hi Bridget! You can make it as long as you want :) If you have a lot of yarn and want to make a long scarf, go for it! Or you can make a shorter one with buttons that is more of a neckwarmer. I’ll show how to attach the buttons in a couple of weeks :)

I completely agree! Holding the needles like that will make it incredibly difficult (and time consuming) to knit an entire row, let alone a finished product. And tension is the biggest hurdle for teaching those new to the craft (at least in my experience).

I really appreciate this series – I always wanted to learn knitting, and truly appreciate the video as well (that lady’s voice is so soft and sweet !).

However, if I may make a comment, I think you made a poor choice of yarn (black and white mixed together) for a beginner’s class. It makes it really hard to understand your pictures. It looks like two different threads are used and the whole thing becomes very confusing. Maybe for the next projects could you try to use single-colored yarn, even if you don’t like it as much ? It would really help seeing the way the yarn goes.

I was very happy to discover this page. I need to to thank you for
your time for this particularly fantastic read!! I definitely liked every
part of it and I have you saved as a favorite to check out new stuff in your blog.

Aside from these pictures being absolutely gorgeous, I love these little lessons! Knitting is something I’ve always wanted to learn how to do and I can’t wait to try it out now thanks to these mini classes.

I’m an intermediate/advanced knitter for over 5 years now. I’d like to suggest that those wanting to learn knitting check out YouTube. Unfortunately, this tutorial is lacking and she is teaching what most would consider the “wrong” way